Sunday, September 25, 2016

Pulling Punches

You didn’t come this far to just get this farYou didn’t shoot for the moon just to hit the starsYou didn’t work this hard just to fade to blackIt cuts me in half to see you hold back - "Demons" by Icon For Hire

We all have potential to be something. The hard part is figuring out what that something is. And while we're en route to figuring it out, we all have to do something else. (That rhyming was entirely coincidental.)

I work in mail sorting (for now); it feels like it might be my something, or it did at one point, until small changes made by management turned into bigger changes, until a weekend bike ride turned into a fortnight-long medical leave, until people who I depended on more than I intended to left for a something else that paid better.

In the meantime, I passed up (and am still passing up) opportunities of my own, because I want it to get better again, I want to hope it will get better again; and because I don't like having a history of staying at a job for only a year or two before moving on (three is my current record). I want to be somewhere for longer, but everything (including myself) conspires against this goal.

I know that not everybody finds their something. I believe that refusing to leave that possibility open feels like a logical fallacy. I recognize that I may never find my something (all the while, optimism is a struggle for me), but I really want to find something that stays good enough, close enough, something-ish enough long enough that my CV isn't just the same 1-3 years that it's turned out to be so far.

For most of the things, the items on my history, I've got a good reason for the brevity. And yes, I recognize and know that the world is changing, turning away from the 40-year career as a norm, and the last I heard, seven was the average number of job changes (citation misplaced) in a given lifetime.

I'm on number 11, and not even thirty yet.

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Oh, and due to my dry spell(s), I'm extending the deadline of the comment contest one week for every week I've missed (which I have yet to actually calculate). Not that I've had more than one participant anyway (you know who you are) who I'd do everything and anything I could for, simply because that's how I am to my friends.